


Sleeping Dragons

by SleepyDragon19



Series: The Others [2]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Case Fic - Sort of, Foxglove Summer compliant, Gen, Post Broken Homes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-03
Updated: 2016-01-18
Packaged: 2018-02-11 14:21:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2071587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SleepyDragon19/pseuds/SleepyDragon19
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The destruction of Skygarden, cryptic messages from talking animals and the betrayal of his second apprentice has pushed DCI Nightingale right to the edge. It’s time to ask for help and people are about to get a timely reminder why it’s best to let sleeping dragons lie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Most Unusual Thursday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Nightingale calls on an old friend to even the odds.

Thursday is a useless day. Nothing ever happens on a Thursday. It is, in fact, the calendar equivalent of no-man’s land; it just hovers there somewhat uncertainly between Wednesday and Friday – somehow managing to avoid belonging to either the mid-week rush or the wind down to the weekend and nowhere is this truer than in a small west country town. The early week special deals to entice customers to spend money after the weekend have all finished, the mid-week farmers market has been and gone and all that can be said for Thursday is that at least it’s heading in the right direction towards Friday and the mirage like weekend that at this point in the week seems a distant and tantalising pool of respite.

But all rules, as they say, have an exception and the exception to this particular unwritten natural law was an otherwise unremarkable Thursday during August.

The first sign that this Thursday was not following the usual weekly plan was a beautiful vintage Jaguar Mark II parked neatly in front of the gate to a house with a sign in the front garden informing those curious enough to decipher its worn lettering that “anyone blocking the gates will be shot; survivors will be shot again or sold to the circus”.

The precise rat-a-tat-tat knock on the door at exactly 7:30am was the second sign that something unusual was occurring. No one ever knocked on number 36 Winifrith drive that early in the morning – not after the unfortunate incident with Kevin Withelwaite and the raffle tickets anyway.

It was well known in the local community that the person who lived there was most certainly _not_ fond of mornings, early morning visitors – or visitors in general, for that matter. Only the most foolish (or those who didn’t know better) would even attempt to visit this particular house in the morning. A nosy next door neighbour at number 34 cackled with glee as she waited for the entertaining reaction of number 36s young owner to being prodded awake at this hour.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl, even the bird song grew quieter, as inside the house there was an audible thump followed by a moan of pain and the sound of a large dog barking behind the front door. Mrs McMannis at number 34 rubbed her hands together and wished she had mastered the use of the camera function on that smart phone doo-hicky her son had given her recently.

The barking grew quieter as an irritable voice called out, audible through the open upstairs window, “alright, alright, I’m coming. Bloody Hell! I’ve already told you four times – I DO NOT want any more god forsaken cookies, I have no interest in adopting a sad faced Camel – they ALL have sad faces - and I don’t give a damn about sponsoring the bloody village fete”.

Mrs McMannis crept towards the edge of her front garden to get a better view of number 36 just in time to witness the third sign that this particular Thursday was not going to follow the usual pattern. Opening the door was a yawning young woman in her mid to late twenties with brown-red hair pulled back into two plaits and odd violet eyes.

“Hello Gwen,” said the Jaguar driving stranger “I need a favour”.

“Not the Girl Guides then,” the young woman stated in evident surprise before saying, “I think I’d best put the kettle on”.  And to Mrs McMannis’ considerable surprise, rather than the familiar spectacle of the visitor dazedly drifting away from number 36 with no clear recollection of why they had gone there in the first place, their hair turning blue, or a spontaneous shower erupting over the neighbourhood, as frequently happened with unexpected guests at that house, the young woman stepped aside before pulling the smartly dressed man into the house by his suit jacket and shutting the door with a loud clang.

Mrs McMannis turned away, disappointed, to go back to her own house. There had been a number of odd occurrences since the new owner of number 36 had moved in nearly two years ago. It wasn’t uncommon for the residents of Winifrith Drive to have to take delivery of parcels or walk the delivery driver to the door of number 36 before they could seem to find it; even with the aid of the very latest SatNav. The flowers seemed to bloom more brightly and for longer in the garden of 36 than in any of the others nearby no matter what the owners tried, and it didn’t bare thinking about why all the cats in a three road radius seemed to have mysteriously vanished since that dog had arrived.

But this was very unusual. Despite the concerted efforts of most of the neighbourly matrons in the area never in the two years that the young woman had lived at number 36 had a visitor been invited inside.  


	2. Out of Options

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which stories are told, dragons are poked and Gwen drinks far too much tea

“ _Well bloody, buggering, fuck_. _What a mess,_ ” was all Gwen could think after Thomas had finished his story.

“Let me see if I’ve got this right” she said at last. “In the space of eighteen months you’ve discovered that someone, somewhere has been initiating new practitioners into the magical arts right under your nose - and has been for an unknown number of years. This group may or may not include a man who seems to be running around London trying for the Moriarty award for criminal enterprise. You have no idea what this man actually looks like because he may - or may not - have an actual face and all you know about this individual is that he likes performing genetic experimentation on unfortunate demi-fae, killing people in grizzly ways and blowing up protected architectural and magical landmarks for reasons also as yet unknown.”

Nightingale nodded solemnly.

“This man, who may or may not have a face, and, may or may not be in London at the moment, in addition to this, has also persuaded your newly minted second apprentice - who may or may not have recovered from the revenant possession which destroyed _her_ face - to join him in his super-secret and inevitably diabolical master plan. While arresting the aforementioned criminal mastermind your first apprentice was incapacitated by your other apprentice, courtesy of a taser in the back, in order to facilitate the escape of this _‘man’_ before disappearing off with him; presumably to live not-very-happily-ever-after by wreaking havoc and mayhem. So as it stands at the moment; on the one hand you have a faceless nutter getting up to who knows what, to who knows who, aided by a possibly deranged former apprentice who has broken her oaths; and on the other, a probably traumatised loyal apprentice, who you’ve left alone in the Folly, as London’s sole magical defence against nefarious plotting while you’re off capering around unimportant West Country towns visiting old friends.”

“That is about the sum of it, yes,” Nightingale replied tiredly, as ever reluctantly impressed by Gwen’s ability to boil complex situations down to the most basic, and in this case, ridiculous level. 

“Well, isn’t that just a cluster-fuck of catastrophes!”

“Quite”.

All things considered Gwen was starting to wonder if she shouldn’t just give up today as a bad lot and go hide under her duvet to await the coming apocalypse. ‘ _This is why I don’t deal with mornings,’_ she thought to herself, watching her friend absentmindedly stroking her dogs fur.

When she had opened her front door this morning after being roused at the frankly unreasonably earlier hour of half past seven and seen who it was standing in front of her she had been as ecstatic as her sleep riven mind could tolerate. Thomas Nightingale was not only her oldest but one of her closest friends. Having known him since she was a wee nipper he was practically family and there was very little (including being woken up at ungodly hours of the day) that she wouldn’t do for him.

“Go on through to the kitchen and make yourself at home” she had called as she pelted up the stairs at an impressive rate of knots, leaving the policeman to have his obligatory poke around her home.

By the time she had washed, dressed, started to wake up and made it back downstairs, her friend had located the kitchen and was in the process of making tea.

One story worthy of a television mini-series and five cups of tea later and there they were sitting on the thickly padded sofas in the conservatory in contemplative silence as Gwen tried to digest the rabbit hole she had just fallen down.

It really was too early to be dealing with this. _Tea, tea was the answer…_

“I need more tea” Gwen declared, forcing herself up off the sofa and through the patio door into the large kitchen in search of caffeinated refreshment in the forlorn hope that the day would get better after cup number six.

 

* * *

 

Nightingale stared around the brightly lit room feeling lost and unexpectedly drained from their conversation. A brief smile flickered to life on his face at Gwen’s familiar reliance on tea as the answer to any problem. It had been nearly five years since he and Gwen had last seen each other on a poetically miserable day in Heathrow waiting for her plane to start boarding. So much had happened in that time, so much had changed and yet sitting here in her conservatory it felt the same – as if the incident which had sent his beloved friend fleeing from the country (and him) hadn’t occurred, that he was still apprentice-less and London wasn’t the battlefield he feared it was once again becoming.

It was a calculated risk coming to Gwen for help and one he still wasn’t entirely sure was the right decision; but he was out of options. Lesley’s defection and the danger to Peter had forced his hand and pushed him right to the edge of a precipice he hadn’t even been aware he had been standing on in the first place. The solid ground he had been so sure of beneath his feet had been whipped out from under him, and as a consequence, he and Peter were scrabbling desperately in the dark trying to keep things together. Magic wasn’t dying, it was coming back - faster, stronger and more violent than he could ever have imagined and London wasn’t prepared to weather the storm it was bringing in its wake.

Gwen was powerful, clever and well connected – she would be able to look after Peter, to protect him as he consistently failed to and with her would come the authority of The Magisterium: an organisation which predated the Folly by millennia.

Surviving in the shadows of government and myth, the Magisterium was spoken of in hushed, almost fearful whispers, by the magical community who still referred to this mysterious group only as _The Others;_ even though it had been nearly three hundred years since the Magisterium had been an active presence in this realm.

Even the Isaacs had only the barest understanding of who and what this group was. For most Isaacs the Magisterium had been little more than a historical footnote in their history lessons; something that had been once and now was not. But over thirty years of knowing one of its members had given Nightingale an unprecedented level of insight and knowledge about them. They were the original magical law enforcement agency; the ultimate authority on all things magical in Europe and as feared as they were their power was respected. They were the bogeymen of the magical world, the threat used to keep misbehaving children in line and it was only through their permission and support that the Issacs had risen at all.

And Gwen was descended from one of the founding families.  If anyone could protect Peter and tip the balance back in their favour it would be Gwen.

But the question was would she come? Gwen had a life here, one which she evidently felt settled enough in to buy a house and take on the fur ball currently using his feet as a pillow and, to make matters worse, London was not the most comfortable place for her kind let alone someone with her talents.

 “His name’s Triton, by the way,” Gwen’s voice called from kitchen jerking him out of his thoughts as a steaming tea pot, cups, milk, sugar and biscuits all arranged themselves on the tray without her ever touching them.

“Who?” Nightingale queried, eyebrows jerking up in concern at the casual display of magic. The last time he had seen Gwen her magic had been unstable, unpredictable and prone to making things randomly explode whenever her concentration drifted. He had known from their regular phone calls that her control had improved during her time abroad but seeing this unintentional display of fine control and the level of comfort his friend had rediscovered with using magic caused some previously ignored tension to relax. _‘At least this would be one less thing I need to be concerned about,’_ Thomas thought to himself as relief solidified in his gut.

“Your new best friend,” Gwen nodded at the Labrador sized creature flopped over her guest’s expensive handmade leather shoes as she walked back into the conservatory, tray floating obediently behind her.

“I rescued him from the RSPCA.”

“Don’t you mean you rehomed him?” Thomas queried watching the tea pot in concern as seemingly without direction it had started to pour its content into his cup while the milk jiggled impatiently behind it.

“No, I meant rescued,” Gwen continued, taking her tea and greedily gulping the hot liquid “the stupid people there had no idea what he was or how to cope with him. Not that I should blame them really; after all he’s not exactly your run of the mill mundane dog and they weren’t to know he’s a protected magical species.”

Nightingale nodded absentmindedly, his attention flitting over the room as he tried to work out how to approach the reason for his visit.  

“I wasn’t aware you liked Hemmingway, Gwen.” Nightingale stated, his eye catching the framed quote on the wall.

 ‘All things truly wicked start with innocence’. All things considered it was an apt warning given the circumstances of his visit - if one that was perhaps veering towards prophetically fatalistic. Good and evil were divided in such a binary way now that it was often easy to forget that good intentions often paved the way to hell: Thomas could only hope that this would not be the case with shanghaiing Gwen into this madness.

If the non-sequitur bothered her it didn’t show as Gwen replied with an amusement grin “I don’t. It was a house warming present from Galahad, you know what he’s like about Hemingway. Anyway, I liked the quote so I kept it. It was better than Gawain’s idea of a gift – he took a leaf out of Harry Potter and sent me a toilet seat engraved with ‘something wicked this way comes’ on it”.

“I met him once, you know,” Nightingale commented companionably gesturing at the quote on the wall.

“Gawain? Of course you did, muppet, you met at my birthday party eight years ago. Golly, I didn’t realise age was finally catching up with your memory”.

With an unusually sour look, the wizard corrected her “Ernest Hemmingway, Guinevere. I recollect your older brothers quite well enough, thank you. Not that I think it would be possible to forget them considering the shenanigans Gawain got up to with the punch bowl. Poor Molly nearly had a fit over the stains and the less said about the chandelier the better, quite frankly”.

“That’s Gawain for you,” Gwen laughed companionably before asking about Nightingale’s meeting with the famed author.  

 “Oh, it was a long time ago now - back in the 20s sometime, while he was living in Paris with his first wife. It was during one of my first assignments for the Foreign Office. There was some trouble with a graveyard hag and a few overly active skeletons. I doubt he’d have known what to do with you, Gwen. He _loved_ women; particularly clever, pretty ones, but he would never have understood your philistine preoccupation with only reading stories with happy endings.” 

Gwen’s bright, mirthful laughter was contagious and Thomas couldn’t help but smile at her amusement. It was one of Gwen’s most endearing qualities – the ability to laugh at almost anything and to do so in such a way as to make the people around her feel included in the joke. It was something he hadn’t realised just how much he needed until this moment.

“Life’s too full of drama and unhappiness as it is,” Gwen chortled “why suffer through it in fiction as well?”

“Some people might say it is edifying,” Nightingale commented drily.

“Pah, give me hope any day,” was Gwen’s tart response as she gradually calmed down, brow furrowing in thought as she watched her friend’s face crease in distressed fatigue, graceful pianists fingers moving from his lap to knead his forehead and temples.

“What do you need, Tom?” she queried quietly “you said you needed a favour - do you need me to contact the Witenagemot?”

“No!... I don’t know…maybe, I’m hoping it won’t come to that. Hoping… ha!” Nightingale replied, fingers now harshly pinching the bridge of his nose. Hope had always been an emotion he had struggled with. Even before the catastrophe that had been Ettersberg, hope had been a foreign, and often unwelcome, friend. Poisonous, traitorous and fickle it tried to soften your acceptance of what is, and what must be, with the siren call of what _could_ be. There were few things, in Nightingale’s opinion, as dangerous as hope. The likelihood was the Lesley was already far beyond the point of redemption, of saving, yet the policemen could not quite bring himself to take the final step just yet and sign what would almost certainly be her death warrant by alerting the council which governed the Magisterium. 

Gwen stared at her the DCI in concern, her fingers itching to reach out and hug the man in front of her. These mood swings were frankly unnerving; rarely had Gwen heard her oldest friend sound so lost and defeated and the sudden shift from good humoured teasing to this despondency was distinctly worrying considering the older wizard’s typical stoicism. The Thomas she had known for the past thirty odd years might have had enough guilt to power London for the next decade but he had never before shirked his duty, nor turned away from what he knew must be done because of it.

“She might not be beyond redemption and I owe it to her as her former master, no matter how brief that time was, to wait for incontrovertible evidence before I take such a step.”

“She’s a warlock, Thomas, an _Oath-breaker_!” Gwen replied forcefully. “It really doesn’t matter what her reasons are – magic doesn’t forgive such actions easily or often”.

Fate having cursed Gwen with more brothers than any one female should have to put up with, the young Magi easily read the stubborn, determined set to the Isaac. Huffing with frustration, Gwen chose a different tack.

“You do realise that Lesley May has now succeeded in shooting both of you?” Gwen queried sarcastically, “call me cynical but am I the only one who’s starting to see an alarming pattern developing here?”

“They are hardly comparable situations, Guinevere,” Nightingale replied in a reproachful voice. “Lesley cannot be held responsible for shooting me, she was possessed at the time by a singularly powerful revenant, as you well know”.

“You assumed it was Mr Punch controlling Lesley – and in a standard revenant possession I would be inclined to agree with you – but this wasn’t exactly standard was it,” Gwen corrected, annoyance creeping into her tone for the first time since her irritable awakening three hours before. “For one thing, there’s a reason why there is the golden-day rule in dealing with revenant possessions…”

“In an unwilling host the spirit must use great force and therefore magic to subdue and suborn the will of the host. The greater the use of thaumaturgical force the greater the rate of mental decay and the more unstable the possession is likely to become,” Nightingale quoted reluctantly; all the niggling doubts that he had spent the better part of eighteen-months ignoring stampeding to the fore with a growing clamour at Gwen’s encouragement. There was a lot about the situation involving Mr Punch that had made little sense at the time and even less with the advantage of hindsight. There were plenty of doubts and inconsistencies which he had dismissed - first because he had been recovering, then for Peter’s sake and, later still, for Lesley’s own as he tried to form a working relationship with the frosty, borderline truculent, PC prodigy he had been unexpectedly lumbered with. But regardless of whether these qualms had a basis in fact, the reality of the situation had not changed.  

“Exactly!” Gwen said, “from what you’ve said Lesley must have been possessed at least a week before the events in Covent Garden. How long had the other victims survived possession?”

“Twenty-four to forty-eight hours,” Nightingale sighed, “I know what it is you are trying to say Guinevere but I can’t…”

“What of the threat she poses to Peter? She’s already attacked him once – what if next time it’s not a Taser but a fire ball?”

“It _is_ Peter I am thinking of! He will never forgive me if I act precipitously in this, Gwen. There has to be evidence …I, I…I cannot lose him too. Maybe this is just another example of an old wizard’s folly but if it is then it is one I must add to my list. If I call in the Magisterium now…”

‘ _He may have a point there,_ ’ Gwen admitted to herself as she settled herself back into the overstuffed armchair. To say that the Magisterium did not take kindly to renegade oath-breakers would be like saying that Drow blades were rather sharp or that dragon fire was a rather warm. Not to mention that inviting the Magisterium into your business was a rather akin to having a lion at the dinner table: even if you weren’t worried that you were going to be eaten or get torn to pieces, it was still dangerous, decidedly out of place, and more than enough to make the neighbours nervous. In this case the neighbours included all of the magical, and most of the magically aware, beings in the London area.

And then there was the thorny issue of jurisdiction.

From the time that an annoying Cambridge mathematician had first started asking awkward questions and poking his nose into the magical world the Magisterium had taken a more back seat role in maintaining law and order in Britain; deciding to concentrate on the management of the other seven realms it had to deal with on a regular basis and occasionally monitoring the 9th forbidden world most Magi preferred to pretend existed only in ghost stories.

Everyone was, on the whole, much happier with this arrangement; the magical community avoided dealings with a race of beings they were terrified of, peace was maintained between the realms, the crown managed to fandangle some control of a situation they had always been excluded from and Newton got to have his super-secret magic club. Everyone was a winner.

Then the clusterfuck that was Ettersberg happened and the precarious tightrope balance that had been maintained for the past two centuries had started crumbling.

With the Isaac’s now in terminal decline the Magisterium had been forced (with a considerable amount of displeased creaking and groaning) into activity in this realm once again in order to find and train those with magical aptitude to fill the vacuum. Despite a renewed presence in England the Magisterium’s attention, however, had not yet been drawn to the goings on in London. Given the delicate – read volatile – situation that was the magical community’s historic relationship with the Magi, and the agreement of non-interference dating from the handover of authority to the Isaacs, little attention had been paid to the goings on in magical London in favour of consolidating an international foothold in key mundane organisations from which the Magisterium could best intervene and manage any magical situation likely to develop.

But if there was one thing Gwen was absolutely certain of at this juncture it was that if the Witenagemot was made aware of the situation there would be no hope of talking to, let alone saving, her friend’s wayward apprentice.  

 “What does Peter need?” she asked gently, an idea taking shape in her mind as she attempted to bring Thomas to the point of his unsociably early visit. The vagaries of mood she had so far witnessed this morning and the current of desperation that thrummed through the Isaac’s every word and gesture were flashing like a mayday flare that something was very, terribly wrong.  It would be out of character for her friend to seek help for himself, particularly if it meant running the risk of involving the Magisterium and potentially upsetting the precarious balance - but for Peter, a little voice in her head warned, there would be very little he wouldn’t consider doing, no price he wouldn’t pay; and that was a worrying thought indeed. 

A mirthless laugh escaped Nightingale as he sat despondently with his head in his hands “more than I can give him at the moment,” he rubbed his eyes tiredly trying to focus his mind.

“I’m reluctant to ask this of you, Guinevere, knowing your particular sensitivities and how difficult this is likely to be for you, but I am out of options…”

Sighing heavily the Isaac continued, “I need to be away from the Folly for a while. There are questions I need answers to.”

“Answers that aren’t in London?”

“Not in this case,” Nightingale replied tiredly.

Gwen studied her friend, “I take it you haven’t discussed this with Peter?”

“Peter believes I am going on an ACPO mandated media relations training course – he had many _‘helpful’_ pieces of advice when I informed him of it yesterday”.

Gwen snorted inelegantly at the mental image of older Isaac handling a press briefing, “I bet!” she chortled, “you? Talking to the media? And telling them what exactly – that, sorry, but all the things adults spend years convincing their children aren’t real actually are, and that, yes, you ought to be checking every night for monsters under the bed? I thought it was Met policy to keep you as far away from the dreaded journo’s as is humanly, and magically, possible.”

“Quite”

“And Peter bought that excuse? Can’t he check to see if there is even a media relations course running this week?”

Here at least Nightingale had the grace (or probably the good sense) to look a little chagrined – “there is an actual course starting this Saturday and slated to run until the following Wednesday – one on which I have a place booked – I just won’t be taking up this opportunity to learn more about our journalist friends.” The older wizard lapsed into a heavy silence, reluctant now the point had come to actually voice the favour he was asking.

“You want me to go to London and baby-sit Peter,” Gwen said after a moment of careful observation, desperately trying to suppress a shudder at the thought of a prolonged stay in that particular city. Nightingale’s honest recognition that such a favour would be ‘difficult’ was a tactful understatement. London was a magical cesspool for her kind; nearly two thousand years of practitioners had insured that magic had seeped into the ground, the buildings and even the very air to the point where even the protection offered by the solid Roman foundations buried deep beneath the city had been overwhelmed. There was a reason why she had chosen _this_ new housing estate in _this_ town – it was literally saturated in Roman remains – remains which helped cut off the overpowering connection to magic and helped keep her _gifts_ under tight control. Yes, ‘difficult’ would be an understatement.  

“Perceptive as usual, I see,” Thomas nodded. “Peter needs training more than ever and I doubt very much that I will be able to devote the necessary time to it; one of us has to be on call. In her last communication with Peter, Lesley intimated that we had around a year before whatever is in the pipe-line is due to come to fruition. There is no one better, no one I trust more, and both Peter and the Folly need protection…” the wizard trailed off again running a hand through his hair, silver eyes staring vacantly into the garden, for once not even noticing the dazzling array of flowers bursting with colour and unusual vibrancy.

“You think the Folly might be breached?” Gwen asked in alarm, her mind trying to recall what she knew about the intricate wards surrounding the place.

“No,” grey eyes snapped back to meet Gwen’s violet ones as Nightingale quickly reassured her, “the wards around the Folly should hold, although there are areas that could do with improved security. My main concern is the coach house; Peter has adopted it as a refuge and spends a significant amount of his time working and relaxing there, the difficulty is that it is outside the ward boundaries.”

 “You are without doubt the best warder I know, if anyone can improve the defences and security it will be you,” Nightingale continued, hands dropping from his hair to reach across and grasp one of Gwen’s.

“Darling, I’m the only warder you know,” Gwen teased trying to summon one of her customary smiles.

“And therefore the best,” Nightingale re-joined, flashing his friend a small grin before reverting to his previous seriousness while he debated whether to raise what would almost certainly be the clincher in persuading Gwen to help. The charged silence that had descended upon the room spoke volumes as to Gwen’s reluctance and disinclination.

Distasteful though he found it to play upon the young Magi’s sympathies and family obligations he could see her visible reluctance to commit herself to what would be a long stay in the Folly and he – they – desperately needed her help. The Isaac ruthlessly repressed the reflexive surge of guilt he felt at what he was about to do - he had no doubt that Gwen and Peter would get along famously once they finally met and he would be back in the Folly in just over a week to help his old friend cope with the fallout from her stay in London.

 

* * *

 

Determined that her Thursday afternoon would significantly less drama filled than her morning had turned out to be, Gwen started to clear away the tea things back onto the tray for a trip to the dishwasher. She had just succeeded in freeing herself from the grasping clutch of her favourite overstuffed armchair, fully laden tea-tray in her hands, when the Isaac broke the silent war of attrition she had been carefully maintaining.

“There is one more thing,” Nightingale said at last, in a distinctly Columbo-esq way.

Muscles tensed, Gwen paused in the doorway to the kitchen, her back still to the quietly speaking Isaac.

“Peter was called away to Herefordshire last month. He spent two weeks working with the local constabulary to find two missing children who had seemingly vanished into thin air.”

A cold, nebulous dread started to fill Gwen’s stomach as she turned away from the freedom the Kitchen seemed to offer to face the older wizard.

“During the course of his investigation, Peter became involved in what he described as a hostage situation with the Fae,” Nightingale continued tonelessly, emotionless in the now heavy silence.

“To prevent the Fae from taking the children again Peter offered himself as an alternative hostage to what he described as the Fae Queen…”

A noise of distress escaped Gwen, tea-tray rattling in white knuckled hands, as she hurriedly resumed her former seat.   

“A River genius-loci by the name of Beverly Brook was able to prevent the Fae from taking Peter fully into their realm. However…,” he added darkly, the first hint of emotion creeping into his voice, “by the time Miss Brook was able to intervene, Peter had already spent at least two hours in the borderlands.”

“Peter had always shown remarkable sensitivity to vestigia and the magical world, even reporting visions on at least two occasions that I know of, but since his return…”

_‘Oh bloody, buggering, fuck!’_ was all Gwen could think as her hand reached automatically for the teapot. This was all they needed.

It really was far too early in the day for this.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: An Unexpected Visitor  
> In which Peter Grants fully expecting a quiet weekend while his boss is away opens the front door to the Folly and gets a surprise.


	3. An Unexpected Visitor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Peter Grant fully expecting a quiet weekend while his boss is away opens the front door of the Folly and gets a surprise.

With Nightingale out of the way for at least a week on yet another ACPO mandated training course Peter fully expected the time to continue in much the same way as the last few months (excluding those weeks in Herefordshire): quiet, subdued and desultory.  As far as he and Nightingale had been able to determine there was nothing going on in London of a magical and illicit nature… at all.

It was as if the events of Sky Garden had sent the magical community in London scarpering out of the city – there had been none of the usual complaints that were common during the summer months, Nightingale’s informers were all keeping schtum and even the normally raucous imps in Regent’s Park were behaving themselves. For Peter and Nightingale, however, the peace was an uneasy one - it smacked too much of the calm before the storm for either one of them to relax or feel settled. The only good thing about this was that it provided some much needed breathing space between the MET proper and it’s only magical department.

Tensions between the MET and the Folly were at an all-time high following Faceless blowing up Sky Garden and the debacle that had been the Herefordshire case.  The residents were furious, the media were having a field day and the local council was in disarray as it became known that the ‘terrorist’ was actually one of their sub-contractors. But that was nothing compared to the MET which was buzzing like an angry wasp’s nest - smarting over their humiliating failure to arrest the criminal and the loss of one of their own. 

The Folly, i.e. Peter and his boss, were once again considered persona non-grata by DCI Seawoll and other senior staff. Peter hadn’t been there when his boss had had to explain to the bear like presence of DCI Alexander Seawoll and his terrifying midget of a DS, Miriam Stephanopolous, why it was their protégé was now on the Folly’s watch and take out list as he’d been in the middle of yet another check up with their tame doctor to triple check that two bouts of 50,000 volts in quick succession hadn’t done him any harm in the long run.

It didn’t take a genius, however, to guess how it went. The two times he had seen Seawoll since then (first at his official debrief where he’d had to make a formal complaint about Lesley and second at the follow up meeting with the Commissioner where he had had to explain it all over again) the DCI had made his unhappiness only too apparent and, while he had yet to actually say anything on the subject to him, it was only too clear to Peter that Seawoll desperately wished it had been him, not Lesley, who had run off with Faceless. It surprised him how much that knowledge hurt; he’d have thought after all the experience he’d had with disappointing people, with not being good enough, that it would have stopped bothering him by now – but it hadn’t. And what was worse still was the growing worry that Nightingale felt the same way – that he too would trade him in a heartbeat for perfect copper Lesley May.

As the days stretched into weeks after Lesley’s abrupt departure from the Folly and the pall her absence had cast remained unabated this fear had flourished. Nightingale hadn’t said anything, hadn’t blamed Peter, but then even Seawoll hadn’t come out and said it to his face, and with the oppressive, mournful silence that had taken up residence in the Folly all of his old fears and insecurities had made a reappearance; worries which had only grown worse after his brief sojourn in the fairy lands. Never one to indulge in unhealthy bouts of excessive introspection, Peter resolutely turned his thoughts back to the Latin homework his boss had set him before his departure. There may be no crime to solve but he certainly had plenty of verbs to conjugate.

When Nightingale had informed him around lunch time in one of his perfectly punctuated texts to expect a Doctor Trevelyan (who was an old friend of his) Peter had assumed that this old friend would be in keeping with the other _old_ friends his boss had introduced him to: i.e. old, male and either ex-isaac or with an interest in the occult and odd.

What he had not been expecting when he opened the front door of the Folly that evening to greet this old friend was a plump twenty-something-year-old wearing sunglasses, distressed boot cut jeans and a cartoon t-shirt of a purple dragon proudly proclaiming “I don’t suffer from insanity… I enjoy it”.

“Hello,” the unexpected visitor said smiling at him impishly “you must be Peter – we’re going to get on famously, I just know it”.

“Errrrr… yes, and you are?” Peter asked in confusion, looking at the young woman curiously as she bounced from foot to foot.  

“Oh, sorry,” the stranger said, sketching a courtly bow and doffing a pretend hat.  “Gwen Trevelyan, fairy godmother, baby-wizard-sitter and warder extraordinaire, at your service”.

“Doctor… Trevelyan?” Peter queried in disbelief, eyebrows shooting up as he examined the woman on his doorstep more closely.

Smiling in obvious pleasure, the newly named Gwen replied, “yep, that’s me. Tom said he’d let you know I was coming when I spoke to him after lunch. I would have been here hours ago but the M4 was a total nightmare.”

“Errrrrrrr, yes, he did - that is he said that an old friend of his was coming to stay I just hadn’t…” Peter stumbled to a halt, his brain taking a moment to work out the oddest part of Doctor Trevelyan’s rambling introduction… Tom?

“Pictured me?” Gwen chortled, “yes I can quite see I wouldn’t be what you’d expect” and with that the odd woman bounced across to pull the shocked apprentice into a surprise hug as she continued with a joyfully ominous, “we’re going to have so much fun, you and I – I do hope you like big dogs,” before skipping back down the steps to the expensive looking BMW estate parked illegally just down the road.

Peter stood gaping on the front step; what the hell had happened to reality and when was it coming back?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Up next: An Inspector Calls  
> In which Nightingale eventually returns from whatever it was he was doing while not attending his ACPO media relations course, Seawoll has a headless corpse dumped in his lap and dark dreams start haunting the Folly.
> 
> Now, I have something of a dilemma for you lovely readers: chapter four is nearly finished and should be with you by the end of Jan (assuming my thesis is in a sharing mood). Chapters 5, 6 and 7 are also mostly written, so would you rather I space chapters out so I have a chance to finish 8 and 9 or would you rather than all the written chapters in quick succession and then wait a while for the next lot?
> 
> Anyway, let me know which you'd prefer.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everyone. 
> 
> This is a fairly long fic continuing on from A Wizard's Lament - it isn't necessary to read the story but it might clear up a few questions which will almost certainly crop up along the way if you have. 
> 
> This was meant to have been finished by the time Foxglove summer (finally) came out. However, a nasty car accident and my PhD rather got in the way of that - and then once I read F.S. I realised how similar certain bits of it were and so the whole thing has had to undergo a rewrite in order to be canon compliant. So here it is, the new (and hopefully improved) Sleeping Dragons. 
> 
> Coming up in chapter 2:  
> Out of Options: In which stories are told, dragons are poked and Gwen drinks far too much tea


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